The red haze in Lu's vision bled away. The pounding, all-consuming imperative faded. The Wild Beast Berserker state, its hunger momentarily sated by the slaughter of thousands, receded like a tide.
{MYTHIC SKILL DE-ACTIVATING. BURNOUT IMMINENT.}
The awareness returned to Lu's eyes. He looked down at his hands. They were unrecognizable, monstrous things of gore. He felt the cool, sickly air on his blood-soaked skin. He smelled the copper stench, a thousand times stronger now. He saw the weapon in his hand, fused to his flesh, and with a gasp of revulsion, he willed it to release. The bone-like spurs retracted, the crimson crystal dimmed to its original blue, and it clattered to the corpse beneath his feet.
He looked out.
He saw the mountain of dead he stood upon. He saw the concentric rings of shattered bodies radiating out from his position, a macabre topography of his passage. He saw the sea of faces staring up at him—elf faces, pale and elegantly pointed, filled not with gratitude, but with abject, petrified horror. He had saved their flank. He had broken the Red army's assault. And he had terrified them more than the enemy ever could.
He took a step. A single drop of blood fell from his fingertip.
Drip.
The sound was obscenely loud in the perfect silence. It echoed across the field.
He tried to speak, to form a word—what, how, I—but his throat was raw from the roar, and only a dry rasp emerged. The sound made an elf knight in pristine silver plate flinch violently, dropping his sword into the mud.
Lu Yan, the hollow man, stood atop his mountain of the dead, completely alone in a crowd of thousands. The emptiness inside him was gone. It had been filled, to the brim and overflowing, with blood. And for the first time, shivering in the cold, silent aftermath, he felt a new emotion, colder than the void, sharper than any spear.
It was the first flicker of dread at what he had become, and what the hollow within him had allowed to be born.
{Host has survived the ten-minute threshold.}
{Calculating Essence Harvest…}
{…}
{Calculation incomplete. Quantity exceeds standard parameters.}
{Title Updated: [Butcher of the Crimson Slope].}
{Warning: Primal Mythic Skill [Wild Beast Berserker] is dormant. Integration is permanent. Re-activation conditions: UNKNOWN. Psychological and physiological consequences: UNKNOWN.}
{Recommendation: Do not move. They are deciding if you are a savior or a scourge that must be ended here and now. The next move is theirs.}
The world did not simply have sound; it was constructed of it. A towering, impenetrable wall of noise that pressed against Lu Yan from all sides, a physical weight on the eardrums, a vibration in the molars, a throbbing pressure against the temples. It was a symphony orchestrated by a mad god:
The SCREEEEE-RAK-KOW of steel on steel wasn't a single note, but a layered catastrophe. The high-pitched shriek of a sword deflecting off a helm, the middle-register grind of a spearhead being wrenched from a shield, the low, wet tear of a blade parting mail and finding flesh beneath. It was the sound of metal being tortured, of protection failing.
The impacts were a brutal percussion section. The THWUMP of a warhammer connecting with a chestplate, a sound so dense it seemed to suck the air from the space around it. The wetter, more final CRUNCH-POP of a mace meeting an unprotected skull, a hideous melon-drop followed by a sickening collapse. The THUD-THUD-THUD of arrows finding homes in shields, in earth, in flesh—a relentless, punctuating rain.
And the screams. Oh, the screams. They were not uniform. They were a choir of agony singing in a hundred broken keys. The short, sharp shrieks of surprise as a blade found an unexpected gap. The long, dwindling wails of men who knew they were gut-stuck and dying slow. The raw, animal bellows of rage that blurred into pain. The choked, gurgling moans of the drowning in their own blood. The wordless, high-pitched keening of sheer, mind-breaking terror. They layered over each other, a tapestry of human suffering so vast it ceased to be individual and became the atmosphere itself, a miasma of audible despair.
The smells layered with the same horrific complexity. The primary note was blood—not the faint, metallic scent from a pricked finger, but the overwhelming, butcher-shop reek of it in gallons, hot and coppery, so thick in the air it coated the tongue and the back of the throat, a taste more than a smell. Underneath it, the smoky, greasy stench of burning things: pitch, wool, leather, hair, and beneath that, the sweet, nauseating odor of cooking pork that was burning flesh. The foul, fecal stench of opened bellies and voided bowels, a primitive, disgusting smell that spoke of total bodily violation. The damp, fungal reek of churned mud mixed with blood, creating a foul paste. And cutting through it all, the sharp, clean, dangerous tang of ozone from magical discharges, like the air after a lightning strike, a scent that promised unnatural, indiscriminate annihilation.
Lu Yan stood in the eye of this sensory hurricane, the Gloomwater Spear trembling in his grip, its cool blue light a pathetic, shrinking island in the roaring red and silver chaos. The dying man—Garroth—sagged against him, a furnace of fading heat and weight. Lu's eyes were locked on Garroth's. He saw the furious, battle-mad light within them gutter, like a candle in a sudden draft. He saw the pupils widen, not with focus, but with the infinite, black dilation of the void rushing in. He saw the man's identity—his memories of a laughing woman by a hearth, his pride in the notched sword now fallen in the mud, his loyalty to the brutish commander whose name died on his lips—all of it pour out of those windows to the soul, leaving only empty, gleaming orbs.
Time stretched. A single, suspended second that contained an eternity of horror.
Then, the physics of this brutal world reasserted themselves. Garroth's weight, now truly dead weight, became an impossible burden on the spear shaft. Lu's arms, already trembling with shock and residual fatigue, buckled. He fell to one knee in the bloody muck, the corpse sliding partly off the crystal tip with a terrible, sucking sound.
It was then that the absorption began.
It was not a gentle process. It was a violent claiming.
A vapor, visible and dense, began to seep from Garroth's body. Not from the wound, but from his pores, from his mouth, from his very eyes. It was the color of arterial blood, of rage, of life at its most violently spent. This crimson mist hung in the air for a fraction of a second, defying the battle's chaos, a ghostly effigy of the man's final, frenzied state.
The Gloomwater Shard-Spear reacted. The calm, blue bioluminescence within its crystal core flickered, dimmed, and was then overwhelmed. A pulse of hungry, black energy radiated from the haft, from Lu's own hands. It was the Hollowed condition, the emptiness within him, acting not as a vessel but as a vacuum. The spear was merely the conduit.
The crimson mist was ripped from the air and drawn into the crystal tip. The blue light vanished, utterly consumed, replaced by a deep, throbbing, internal scarlet that pulsed like a monstrous, embedded heart. The color didn't just stain the crystal; it infected it, racing down the haft in a wave of angry light, following the grain of the dark wood, leaving behind a pattern like blackened veins. The warmth of the energy was not soothing; it was a burning, invasive heat that traveled up Lu's arms, into his shoulders, and slammed into the hollow cavity of his being.